and gateway wanted $199 to fix it

I am trying this, and praying. Ok….it works. 1234567890……..shebang! I can’t believe I did it. I replaced the keyboard, and now it’s working.

The area over the fan gets really hot, and the keyboard sits right on top of it with no barrier or cover. So I think it fried the circuits. Probably what’s wrong with the dvd drive too…..it sits right back up to the fan.

So you have no idea…..I was thinking all these things as I closed the machine back up……what if the ON button doesn’t work? (yes, I had to remove that). What if they mailed me a defective keyboard? How would I know? What if I didn’t get that strip that you have to attach to the motherboard…..what if I didn’t push it in far enough? (took me about 10 minutes to think and decide about whether I should close it all up before powering it up to see if it worked.)

But prudence won out, and I decided to close it up and cross my fingers. And I’ll be damned if luck wasn’t with me for a change.

You can’t imagine how awful I felt when the keyboard stopped working. Just can’t imagine. I spent more money on buying this notebook computer, than i did on my last car. And yes, it sort of chaps my ass that you can purchase the equivalent laptop today for a good $150 less.

And to have something wrong, when I’ve treated this machine like it was made out of glass…..

But for 29.95 and thanks to a gift card to amazon from my friend michelle…..it’s all fixed. Oh….and kudos and thanks to http://www.insidemylaptop.com for excellent and illustrated directions on replacing the keyboard. It was a slightly different model, so figuring out where the screws were proved interesting. Couldn’t have done it without that instruction page, though….and the concise manner in which it was presented made me think “yea….I can do that.”